2. Contact Available Slots

the second step of the process will be to calculate the available slots for each customer in the current period aside from limiting to 2 emails in 10 days, the idea is testing different configurations, such as keep a 10% of our audience with 1 email in 10 days (n 1) keep a 10% of our audience with 3 emails in 10 days (n+1) to this end, you need to set up three selections that are going to update the contact available slots you have defined 1\ create the standard email frequency (80%) create a new selection and name it standard email frequency in the selection criteria step drag your master data extension of customers (in this case, deselect demo customers ) into the selected data extensions section without any other filter proceed to the target definition step click create data extension configure the new data extension like below you can choose the location of your preference click save and add the id of the customer de into the target data extension scroll down to the custom values section and click add new value name it slots , choose fixed , and click next choose the number text field and configure the value that you want to be the standard save your custom value and drag it into target data extension click on save data extension > create on the gear icon next to automap , click sort & limit in the pop up, enable the feature and choose select 80% of records limit random split click save and run 2\ create the low email frequency group once this selection is created, you need to copy it and create the other two low email frequency and high email frequency in the overview of selections, go to the previous selection and click copy in the pop up, change the name of the new selection and keep disabled the copy target data extension option click on copy and open the selection in the selection criteria step , add the contact available slots to the selected data extension , with the following match configuration since you already have the audience with the standard email frequency in the contact available slots de, you want to exclude those to configure the low frequency group click save and go to the next step remove the mapping of the current custom value from the target data extension , as you need to change it to the low frequency value scroll down to the custom values section and click the pencil icon to edit the existing slots value in the pop up, change the value to the low email frequency you want to try (in this case, 1) click save and map again the custom value to the target data extension click the gear icon next to automap and select sort & limit once there, change the existing configuration to select 50% and keep the random split the percentage of records kept is calculated over the resulting records, therefore, you will only have 20% of your audience here (as the other 80% will be excluded) from that 20%, you want to keep a 50%, which is equivalent to 10% of the full audience click save you will see that the green banner above the data extension now says that you are selecting 10% of records randomly, and we are also excluding the previous 80% of the customers with our configuration in the selection criteria click again the gear icon and choose set data action select append and click select save and run your selection 3\ create the high email frequency group all you need to do now is get the rest of the audience in the contact available slots de with the high frequency limit copy the low frequency email data extension, with the same configuration as before 2 leave the selection criteria step as is, to exclude all the people from standard and low groups on the target definition step , remove the mapping of the current custom value from the target data extension, as you need to change it to the high frequency value scroll down to the custom values section and click the pencil to edit the existing slots value in the pop up, change the value to the high email frequency you want to try (in this case, 3) click save and map again the custom value to the target data extension go now to the gear icon next to automap and click sort & limit disable sort & limit , as you now need all the remaining records click save and run your selection 4\ execution you need to execute the selection in the exact order you created them standard > low > high , as you need to exclude the audience from the previous groups to simplify this task, you can create a waterfall selection that contains these three selections as consecutive steps deselect segment will take care of running them in order if you run it, you are going to see that the target data extensions is going to be populated adding the different groups until you get to the whole audience moreover, you can change the limits of the different groups from time to time after comparing the results to test different configurations just by changing the custom value slots in each selection if you don’t have waterfall selections in your edition, you can also achieve this by scheduling the selections independently, 30 minutes apart from each other